These strategies are effective in the sense that they do their job: they stop your body from running on overdrive. But believing that any one of them will truly help you overcome anxiety is an illusion, because you are trying to treat the symptoms as though they arethe problem.

Anxiety is what happens when you need to change some part of your life but you are afraid to move.

Jealousy is what happens when you see someone else allowing themselves to have something that you won’t allow yourself.

Anger is what happens when you have an overabundance of energy that you were supposed to create change with.

Depression is what happens when you start to believe that these stuck and helpless feelings are permanent, and so you just give up.

If you are constantly anxious, you have to change your life.

You have to change your life.

The theme among all of these is that you’re externalizing your control. You have forgotten about your power. The influxes of energy that are rising up are trying to remind you that you can take everything you’re feeling and channel it. That’s all your body is trying to do when it inundates you with emotion: it’s trying to get you to move.

The more you resist the change, the more irrational and erratic your thoughts will become. The more charged your energy will be. You will start having serious over-reactions to simple, everyday things.

Those things are not the real fear, or the real problem. They are safe things that you can project your feelings on, because in the end, you know you can control them. They represent bigger problems that you fear you can’t do anything about.

But you can. And you must.

Right now, you are trying to beat fear to the finish line.

You are trying to condition yourself to be used to pain so that nothing can surprise you or hurt you. This is a malicious illusion.

Your life will not fall apart when you stop worrying, it will come together. Life is not happening to you, it’s a reflection of you.

Changing it for the better doesn’t set you up to fail, it just reminds you that you are meant to create exactly what you want – which is why you feel so strongly about it in the first place.

The people who struggle most with anxiety are people with a ton of latent potential. They are the people with ambitions and dreams and hopes and deep desires. But they also have doubt. They don’t trust their power. They don’t believe they can actualize what’s theirs. They are super successful people who don’t believe they are successful yet. They are the ones who either wake up, or spend the rest of their lives trying to figure out ways to numb their wasted energy.

An anxious mind doesn’t immunize you from pain – it is the pain shaking the chains and asking to be freed.